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Wednesday, 19 October 2016

A taste of the "fun part"

As anyone who talks to me (or reads this blog) knows... I am SO over demolition. I'm pretty sure I was over it two days in to be perfectly honest.

But with some amazing help (shout out to Dave, Candice, Greg, and my parents!) I can actually see the end of demo. Don't get your hopes up. If anything, we have now EXTENDED the timeline for when we might be able to move in because we found some dry rot that we need to take care of. The good news is that the living room is completely down to the studs. No plaster. No lath. No insulation!!

My parents working away removing lath and the oh so messy insulation.

Lovely result of a hard day's work!

This is the unfortunate section where we found dry rot...
This problem (and the bits that we've found elsewhere in the house) have really killed our move-in date...

On that same day, we (and by that I mean Jake and Dave) put one serious problem to rest. When the bathroom was installed upstairs, the people who did it decided to just cut through the floor joists to lay all of the plumbing. They ended up leaving a number of joists only connected by about an inch or two of wood.

This was a big issue and honestly we're all amazed the floor didn't collapse before now.

To prevent that from happening, Jake and Dave sistered up all of the damaged joists.

Dave on the left, Jake on the right, making sure we won't fall through the floor into the study some day.

And as awesome as that day was, it was still either part of demolition or the boring, albeit extremely necessary, structural integrity type of work. So I wasn't really having any fun.

I described my excitement for the "fun part" to begin to my mother-in-law. She asked me what the fun part was and here is my definition:

Fun Part: A term used to describe when things begin to go INTO the house rather than come OUT OF it.

And now we officially have two new things in the house!!!

First, a new electrical panel.

Jake really took the reigns on this one so I don't know much about it other than it used to look like this:

Old panel.

And now it looks like this:

New panel. Oooo! Ahhhh!

Here is a side-by-side comparison because the old one isn't actually gone yet.

Old vs New

The exciting thing about this is that we have a working plug now! So we can use a light and keep working after it gets dark. Since it's beginning to get dark inside the house by 6:30, this is very helpful.

The second thing to go in was a brand new window!!

"Wait, hold on a minute! I thought you said you were going to restore the windows?!?"

Calm down, I am. (Even after a bit of a storm window debacle that I'd rather not get into right now)

This new window went into a place where the original window was removed in the main floor bathroom. Here is what it looked like before:

Inside.

Outside.

As you can see, it was a bit of an eyesore. Plus, once we close up the bathroom again it means there is no natural light in there at all. Having lived in the country for so long, I'm a sucker for natural light. (I will never understand people who have blinds or curtains permanently covering their windows. Do you LIKE living in a cave?!)

The install for this happened early on a Friday morning, so I went to the house to let them in and supervise. Aka I sat on the deck, drank coffee, and browsed the internet on my phone.

My morning perch.

The guys at Better Windows and Doors were amazing. Not only was our window installation able to be bumped up in line thanks to the sales rep Barry, but the two guys that did the install were great! They were super professional and very quick. It was cool watching it all come together.

Here is a picture of the window installed without the exterior flashing/trim:

I could see the awesome potential already!

And then here are the amazing final results!

AMAZING!

It doesn't QUITE match the style of the other windows, but that doesn't really matter for two reasons.
A) It is not on the front of the house.
B) It is right beside the kitchen addition, which has new windows anyway.
So it totally fits in and looks BEAUTIFUL! And what's more, we have natural light in the bathroom!

Here are before and afters:

Before.

After.

Before.

After.

What do you think? I, personally, love it. To add privacy down the road I will be installing stained glass on the inside. But that is another project for another time :)